Identifying and Supporting Productive Collaborative Teacher Talk
Open Access
- Author:
- Flarend, Alice Marie
- Graduate Program:
- Curriculum and Instruction
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- February 13, 2017
- Committee Members:
- Scott P. McDonald, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Scott P. McDonald, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Stephanie L. Knight, Committee Member
Julia Plummer, Committee Member
Susan Strauss, Outside Member - Keywords:
- science teaching
teacher professional development
teacher learning
teacher discourse - Abstract:
- As improvements and changes in science education are promulgated, science teachers must be educated about these changes. Professional development programs are central to promoting teacher learning. Although the field seems to have agreed upon large-scale pedagogical features of high quality professional development with an emphasis on building a collaborative community of learners, effective implementation of these features is still problematic. The connections between these collaborative features and actual teacher work during the professional development remain unclear. This qualitative discourse study investigated how teachers engaged in small group discussions use discourse to collaborate during a weeklong professional development program that employed these useful pedagogical features. Small group discussions among the forty-two participants, diverse in their demographics and teaching experiences, were video and audio recorded. A collaborative discourse framework was developed and applied to the discussions, successfully categorizing episodes of discourse according to their productive potential for learning. The structure of the PD activities was then investigated to determine characteristics encouraging to these productive learning conversations. The analysis in this study indicated requiring groups to come to a consensus helps groups dig deeper into the content, promoting a more productive negotiation of concepts. Building consensus around an artifact, such as a graph, strengthened the need for consensus and thereby strengthened the opportunities for productive conversation. In addition, professional development activities that target building and using specific language were also opportunities for productive learning talk, providing opportunities to negotiate the deep meaning of words and concepts rather then leaving them unexamined. When viewed through the lens of Wenger’s Community of Practice (1998), these findings are ways of strengthening the community. Consensus strengthens the mutual accountability, and the purposeful building of vocabulary strengthens the shared repertoire, as did having the consensus artifact.